Gear & Gadgets —

Ringtones in your home: a review of Ringboxx

If your home phone has been longing for some ring tone lovin', Ringboxx could …

Meet the Ringboxx

Consider the Ringboxx. Like the original iPod, it does a single job well—in this case, bringing ringtones to the home phone—and it comes in white. Instant recipe for success?

Home Phone Tunes hopes so. The small startup (they set up shop in 2005) is launching its flagship product this month, a device that can read Caller ID information and play different ringtones for different numbers. Alternately, those without Caller ID can just let the device play a random ringtone with each call. For anyone who prefers pop music or crude celebrity impersonations to the traditional ring, the Ringboxx offers a solution.

We got our hands on a pre-launch unit. It's a nifty little device, slick-looking and expandable, but concerns about the price may keep customers away.

Let's take a look.

Inside the box

The Ringboxx comes in attractive packaging (always a plus) and includes everything that users need in order to hear "We Are the Champions" blast from the speaker each time the phone rings: software, USB cord, power supply, telephone cord, and the Ringboxx itself. The device is slightly larger than a current-generation iPod and twice as thick. It's well-made, sturdy, and comes with a metal bar that allows it to rest at a rakish angle on the desktop.

The front of the unit houses the speaker, a three-way switch that changes the volume and plays the current ringtone, and a pair of LEDs. The top one lights blue whenever the unit is on, and it's bright enough to burn out the retinas of anyone who stares directly at it for too long. With the unit resting on my desk, the light was a bit too potent, and I found myself angling the Ringboxx away from my face. "At least," I told myself, "I'm sure it's on."

Be glad the LED isn't on

The Ringboxx is simple enough to set up and operate without instructions. Four connectors line the back of the unit: power in, telephone line in, telephone line out, and audio out. Those who want to rock the casbah whenever the phone rings (and who doesn't, really?) can run a simple 3.5mm miniplug to a home stereo or other powered speaker system.

Back of the Ringboxx

The Ringboxx is placed inline between the wall jack and the telephone handset; the idea is that you switch off the ringer on the phone and let the Ringboxx do its thing when it detects an incoming phone call. Because Caller ID information cannot be read until after the first "ring," the ringtone won't start playing until a second or two after a traditional phone would start to jingle. If you have multiple phones on multiple levels of a home, the effect can be a little weird: first the other phones all ring, then Coldplay's "Speed of Sound" bursts from the room with the Ringboxx.

The right side of the device houses the final two ports: a mini USB port for hooking the Ringboxx to the computer in order to download ringtones and an SD card slot for expanding the available memory of the device. Out of the box, the Ringboxx comes with about 500K of flash memory; with an SD card, this can be expanded by another 1GB (cards above this size won't work). Ringtones require about 50K of space apiece.